The Runt of the Litter

Fall Away

Note: Thank you so much to everyone who read, commented, and voted on the last chapter. I am so grateful to all of you.

The title of this chapter comes from the Twenty One Pilots song of the same name. I definitely recommend listening to it if you haven't. In this chapter, Anna is fifteen.




Fall Away

For the longest time, the world existed only as blurs of light and dark accompanied by bursts of low sounds like voices humming. Anna fell through them all in a blissful state of limbo.

Then she woke up. It took ages to force her heavy eyelids open, but once she succeeded, Anna was greeted by a hazy but familiar image. Green eyes, a voice rumbling low and comforting, and scruff beneath her fingers when she reached up foggily to touch what she now recognized as her brother's face.

"Hey, kid. You awake now?"

It was her first time hearing distinct syllables rather than brief and obscure eruptions of sound in a while, so it took her a minute to understand the question. Then, when she tried to answer, her mouth was cotton dry and she only managed to cough.

"Here," came another voice she recognized but couldn't put a name to. "Water."

A plastic water bottle crinkled and then her head was supported and something cold pressed to her lips. She turned away at first, but she heard the word 'water' repeated a couple times and that sounded excellent at the moment, so she turned back to the cold and drank greedily until the bottle was pulled away. Her head fell back against something cushiony but not soft to the touch. She ignored the questioning voice that continued to rumble calmly above her in favor of considering what was beneath her and where she was. Under her head was a jacket, she deduced, and the rest of the details flooded back as she looked over a shoulder to see the off-white ceiling of the car she'd lived in her entire life.

"Wh'appen?" She was exhausted, and her words weren't coming out the way she wanted, but Anna was pretty sure that Dean or Sam would get the gist of what she was asking.

"Witch. We're gonna take the bitch down, Runt. Cross my heart. But we didn't want to leave you alone, so-"

"Where?" She tried to lift her head to see out the window and see where they were, but she was unsuccessful. She could recall only a few times in her life that she'd been hurt enough that she couldn't even lift her head, and that certainly did not paint a pretty picture for how she was doing at the moment. "M'I-?" She couldn't even finish the question as her eyes slipped shut.

"Hey. Hey."

Something irritating kept smacking her in the face. It was relatively gentle, but still annoying and it stung on her overly sensitive skin.

"What?" she snapped and tried to bat the offending touch away. But she couldn't even lift her arm. The startled concern that realization brought on was enough to make her open her eyes. "De-" Then she coughed again and didn't stop until she was lying sideways on the seat, barely awake but definitely not unconscious.

"Sam, get the door," she heard, but it was barely more than a buzz drifting down from above her. "Alright, here we go. Come on, Anna, help me out."

She was all floppy limbs and her head bobbled to the side as he tried to pull her out of the car, but Anna couldn't do a damn thing to help. She just felt so weak, weaker than a newborn kitten. It was terrifying, really, because they didn't live in a world where being weak was okay. Weakness was vulnerability and it was something always being exploited the very second it appeared.

"Weak," she breathed, and couldn't remember afterwards whether she'd actually spoken or not.

"I know," Sam said and then he put an arm under her knees and one under her shoulders and picked her up like she weighed nothing at all. But Anna knew better. She was basically a deadweight right now. Sam was just built like a damn linebacker. "I've gotcha," he promised softly as Dean grabbed a couple things out of the trunk and slammed that and the back door shut.